Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Derek Stillwater Visits JA Konrath's Universe

A while back, JA Konrath, who I relentlessly refer to as "Joe" because, well, that's his name, offered writers the opportunity to write a short story, novella or novel with one of his own characters. He provided guidelines and approaches.

I was interested, but busy doing other things. I'm a full-time freelance writer as well as a novelist. I'm also a ghostwriter and during the period that Joe first made this offer I was pretty tied up with a big historical fiction ghostwriting project and barely got work done on my own novels. One of my writer friends, Jude Hardin, had written a novel, Lady 52, that features his own series character, Nicholas Colt, and Joe's best known series character, Lt. Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels.

Jude suggested I do the same. So I dithered. Then I started in on a novel that would feature my best known series character, Derek Stillwater, with Lt. Jack Daniels. As soon as Joe had made the offer, I knew when I wanted the story to be and what it would be connected to. When I read Joe's novel, Dirty Martini, I always knew Derek would be there in Chicago in some way. So why not have Derek and Jack work together immediately after those events?

I started working on the novel.

The problem is I don't pay much attention to rules, I guess.

Somewhere along the way Jude asked me how I was doing and I mentioned I was working on a novel with Derek and Jack. He said, "Yeah, but, did you write a short story first?"

"No, why?"

Well, it turns out that Joe had a kind of preliminary testing period for writers to do this, and he wanted to make sure they didn't waste a lot of time on a novel that might not work, so he wanted any of us to write a short story first.

Well. So I stalled around for a while, then I wrote a short story, "Black Russian." Then I sent "Black Russian" and the part of the novel I had completed to Joe and I went off and did other things, including finishing my own more recent Derek Stillwater novel, Vengeance.

Eventually Joe and I went back and forth over "Black Russian," then Joe changed the way these projects were going to get done. Rather than Joe being the manager of these projects, Amazon was going to include it in its Kindle Worlds program. But after checking this program, I and quite a few other writers had some issues with it, primarily revolving around owning our own creations shared with Joe's. Joe very generously got his people at Amazon to rewrite their contract agreements and here we go.

This is all rather inside baseball, so to speak.

But what about Black Russian? Well, here are a couple things I knew in writing this short story.

I wanted it to have the name of a cocktail.

I wanted it to be more or less current with the timeline of my latest Derek Stillwater novel, more or less just before or just after the events of Vengeance. That would be very different from the Stillwater-Daniels novel I'm working on, which would be several years earlier, a prequel, if you will. So in this short story, Derek and Jack know each other and are kind of friends. That left me with the dilemma of how to get Derek involved in the story. I figured, since he was headquartered in Washington, D.C., somehow Jack would need to get out there and need his help. And once I got the name of the story, it all pretty much came together. I was also quite pleased to be able to bring in the character of Austin Davis, who is the hero of my novel Hot Money. I plan to revisit Austin again as well and there's a big chunk of a novel done featuring him.